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Wednesday, 19 December 2012

English Heretic Present: The Apartment Trilogy

Taking place during the Glasgow film
festival, "The Apartment Trilogy" is a creative magical
investigation into Roman Polanski's three interior studies from
Repulsion via Rosemary's
Baby to The Tenant. Could it be that the first two
films in the series inadvertently or presciently precipitated the
murder of Sharon Tate in some kind of brutal melange of their
imagistic narratives.

And was The Tenant Polanski's
admission, unconscious or otherwise of his role and guilt in the
celluloid prophecies of his earlier films. Taking props and footage
from Thurloes Beauty parlour in South Kensington, London, the actual
location of the hairdresser's in Repulsion, we will reconstruct an
inner cinema of Catherine Deneuve's psychotic breakdown at the venue
of the Old Hairdresser's in Glasgow.

A second set of performance by The
Blue True will soundtrack key scenes from Rosemary's Baby.
The event will culminate with a screening of The Tenant,
Polanski's self starring paranoid masterpiece.

Between 1965 and 1976 Roman Polanski
directed three films exploring the psychosis of interiors – his
apartment trilogy beginning with Repulsion via Rosemary's
Baby and culminating with The Tenant. Repulsion features
Carol, a schizophrenic hairdresser, the traumas of her childhood
unleashed by adult isolation in a hostile city. As her psychosis
deepens she retreats to her apartment, where the walls of her
identity become persecutory agents. With the logic of her
devastating illness rendering the interface between the concrete and
the human a florid nightmare she murders a licentious suitor and her
overbearing landlord.

In 1968, married to Sharon Tate,
Polanski's composed the ultimate birth anxiety dream of Rosemary's
Baby. Filmed in the gothic Dakota Building, where John Lennon was
murdered in 1980, Mia Farrow is the paranoid mother-to-be, convinced
that her avuncular neighbours are part of a Satanic cult. Moreover,
she experiences recovered memories of the conception, a black mass,
overseen by an Anton Lavey like devil.

In August 1969, the schizophrenic cult
leader Charles Manson ordered his disciples to Cielo Drive in LA.
There they butchered the now pregnant Sharon Tate in a horrific
collage of these two films. Did Polanski somehow through a cinematic
prescience foretell his own tragedy; or more troubling did the films
serve as some kind of accidental occult operation precipitating the
blind atavisms of the demon spheres to seek reification in the
concrete world?

Polanski waited until 1976 to release
his paranoid confessional, The Tenant, in which the director
himself plays a timid Parisian who takes the room of a woman who has
attempted suicide by throwing herself from her apartment. As with
Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion, the neighbours become
grotesque persecutors – this time urging the protagonist to act an
of defenestration. The toilet becomes an hieroglyph adorned hypogeum
as Polanski's cross dresses into the persona of its previous tenant.
Was Polanski's casting of himself in the final act of the Apartment
Trilogy a recognition of his unconscious culpability in the slaying
of his wife? Who was the previous tenant of the apartment – the
ghost of his butchered wife, or Polanski's sublimely paranoid muse?